Saturday, June 18, 2005

When Your Own Laws Bite You

If you are still thinking that the Men and Father's movement is just about angry men that don't want to pay child support, you should read this column by Teri Stoddard.

As she points out, this movement is also a children's movement, because it wants to give the best opportunities for a successful and fulfilling life to children. This is not about beer swigging men wanting out of child support, as the stereotype goes. (Isn't it odd that some of the very people that are most politically correct about "diversity" and such are also those most likely to use a stereotype when it is convenient?)By bringing the adversarial format of our court system into families, without modification, we have taken difficult family circumstances to the lowest common denominator. One side accuses the other of the worst things possible in order to gain advantage. Throw into the mix the fact that "advocates" with either a bone to pick with men generally, or who have been simply misinformed by gender feminists, work hard to scrutinize fathers with the indoctrination that they are guilty simply for being men. Is it any wonder that there are so many frustrated and desperate fathers out there?

Teri, who calls herself a liberal, only discovered the horror of institutionalized hostility toward males after she had to encounter it face to face in the family court system while helping her son fight for the right to parent his child. But, she quickly learned that "non-custodial parent" only means "source of money" and nothing more in the family court system. She also learned what Perry Manley has been saying for years in his lonely fight: combining "non-custodial" with "parent" creates an oxymoron.

Gender feminists and the politicians that do their bidding are very good at wrapping their misandrist ideology in catchy PR sound bites, so you can't blame Teri for being ignorant until getting caught by the horrible system. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is the other side of the same coin.

Unlike the family courts, where grandmothers and step mothers encounter the over-stepping authority of the state firsthand, the discrimination and brutality of VAWA is generally only encountered by men. It is easy to call men that have encountered this attack on liberty and their Constitutional rights "angry." They are! How could they not be? But, there are women who have experienced the injustice of VAWA through their sons or brothers who are also active in fighting it's reauthorization this year. There are also women, like Wendy McElroy of iFeminists, who are simply horrified by the run around the Constitution made by VAWA advocates.

Teri mentions the labeling of fathers fighting for joint custody as "angry fathers" or "angry men." Gender feminists and their lackey politicians use the same label to discredit men angry over the abuse of their civil rights by VAWA. This is a Catch 22 that men and fathers are put into. They are so grossly and unjustly treated that they would have to be in a vegetative state to not be angry. Then, that anger is used as a reason to persecute them. "See? This man is angry only because his patriarchal privilege has been dented."

No, men and fathers are angry because their basic rights have been stolen. Those basic rights – which were not assigned based on sex in our Constitution – were put in place by our Founders to ensure that nobody in America would suffer what men and fathers have suffered for the past decade or more. On the deepest level, the movement, whether you want to call it men, fathers, families, or angry men, is about returning fundamental and “self evident” rights to the picture. It is also about removing hateful ideology – that of gender feminists – from the picture. They can practice their beliefs all they want in America, but should not be able to force them on the rest of us with the complicity and full force of state and federal governments.

Blocking the reauthorization of VAWA in September, or forcing major modifications so it is treated as a sex neutral effort to reduce family violence, is where the anger needs to be directed now. Force a major change in VAWA and, like dominos, the other aspects of unfairness and injustice in family courts and elsewhere will begin to fall.

I feel I must speak in Teri's defense. I am a man and simply DID NOT BELIEVE these kinds of bias really existed. I always thought that the guys I was hearing these stories from were leaving something out. So, for me, I did not become involved until it happened to ME. Every man out there has a mom. If those mothers care for thier sons, then they will vote with us. So whatever it takes for them to see the problem AND care is ok with me. Until it happens to one of your own, you will likely be like I was, an unbeliever. Sometimes I wonder if EVERY man (and the womwn who love him) has to feel the sting of prejudice before anyone will believe it.

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